« Heck of a track meet | Main | Facts about Usain Bolt »

Here's a spoiler

I’ve now heard four… no, make that five takes of… no, six. Six takes of a race call on the women’s 100m hurdles. There are a lot of annoyed noises coming from the other working writers on the tribune. (Seven.) He’s yelling. And it’s all about a hurdler who hit the ninth hurdle and did not medal despite being ranked first all year. Over and over, we hear about how she has lost, how her dream is over.

Not a word about who actually won the race, of course. Even though the gold medalist, too, is an American. Apparently NBC built all their preparation for this race around the hurdler who goofed.

Is it any wonder everyone complains about NBC’s Olympics coverage?

They’re still at it, by the way. Top volume. Amazing. Hey, NBC? You’re doing it wrong.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Posted by pjm on August 19, 2008 11:56 AM |

Comments

Nope. NBC is NOT doing it wrong — at least from its somewhat perverse perspective.

You’re covering sports. NBC is telling stories aimed at a broad audience of non-sports fans.

The NBC approach involves deciding in advance what “the story” is and following the story line to its logical conclusion.

It’s a smart commercial decision. NBC is on track to make $100 million dollars in profit from its games coverage. More importantly, it has sent a message to Wall Street that the network business of assembling large and broad audiences still works. If straight up reporting suffers in the process, so be it.

Given the stakes, NBC can live with the whining of knowlegable fans and writers.

Posted by: Daniel Freedman | August 19, 2008 8:45 PM

Maybe so, but in sticking to the stories it decided ahead of time to cover, NBC is missing perfectly good stories they didn’t expect, stories that Americans would be equally interested in.

Posted by: ralph | August 20, 2008 1:55 PM

And I think the point I didn’t make terribly clearly was that by chaining themselves to this story, they wound casting the race as one runner’s FAILURE rather than another runner’s SUCCESS. Which is particularly unfortunate considering the epic collapse of the U.S. track team in Beijing, our worst performance since Moscow in terms of medals.

Shit happens, as the Athens men’s high jump champion said after finishing 4th here. Why dwell on it? Why not be open to the people who found the door unexpectedly open, and stepped through?

Posted by: pjm | August 20, 2008 2:18 PM

Post a comment